Researchers University of Bristol in Britain, with colleagues in the United States and Poland has found evidence of cheese-making on 7,500 year-old pottery fragments. They analyzed fatty acids embedded in prehistoric pottery from the Polish region of Kuyavia, and found they had been used to separate milk into curds for cheese and whey.

“This constitutes the earliest direct evidence for cheese-making,” said Melanie Salque from Bristol, one of the authors of the research, which was published in the journal Nature.

Milk residues have been found at ancient sites up to 8,000 years old in Turkey and Libya, but there was no evidence that the milk had been processed into cheese.